Jaguar ProController Reproductions Announced

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I just received mine over the weekend. I'm in the middle of a move so I won't get to hook-up the Jaguar for a minute. As soon as I can, I'll post a review and comparison to the original Pro-Controller - which is one of my favorite controllers of all time.

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Oh yes and the original Pro Controllers are quite difficult to find. If you manage to find one you'll have to pay over $100 for one.

TrekMD original Pro controllers are going for way more than $100...I know you said over $100 but in reality it is more like close to $250 for an original jag pro controller. I've used mine a bit since I first posted about it. Others have reported the number pad buttons also getting caught up a bit when pressed down too hard. But they weren't giving me much grief when I was playing several hours of Wolf3D this past weekend with mine. I do have one issue with the d-pad but it didn't happen that often. Basically in Wolf3D something when just wanting to turn right, it would register as if I'd pressed diagonally to the upper right making BJ actually walk and turn instead of just turning as I wanted.

I really need to test these with Battlemorph as that is another of my favorite Jag games. I would say tempest or Rebooteroids but I've got a pretty sweet rotary controller for those two games and you really can't go back to a d-pad once you've play T2K with a rotary.

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I haven't tested both of my controllers...just the one I've actually take out of the box. I mentioned before about the keypad buttons sticking down? Thankfully that really hasn't been an issue in actual game play and I've found that those buttons are quite sensitive and do not require that hard a press to engage them.

But one thing was bugging me at first and I'm glad a fix of sorts has been found.

The issue was that I was playing Wolf3D (Jag version is my favorite version btw), and I was noticing that frequently when trying to turn left on the d-pad that I would actually move up and left. I found I had to press down on the bottom edge of the left d-pad side to make sure I only moved left and didn't move diagonally up/left. Well other buyers of the controller reported the same issue.

Turns out the problem is that there is only a single center mount screw that holds the PCB in place. Because of this there is some play in the PCB allowing it to rotate up and down a tiny bit. If you have the d-pad side down too low, then it is easy to actually be hitting both the up and left contact pads on the pcb at the same time, hence the movement issues.

The fix is to basically loose the center screw holding down the PCB, rotate the PCB just a few mils up on the d-pad side, wedge something between the PCB and the plastic that frames it, and then tighten the screw back down. It was mentioned to use a post-it-note folded up into a small square. I chose to use about 2cm from a cable tie I clipped off and fold that in half to wedge in there.

It did indeed fix the issue.

They could have avoided this by doing two things:

- design the PCB with guide holes in it and plastic pegs molded into the top shell to align the pcb properly. You know like Nintendo and most other controller companies have been doing to ever now?
- Make the contact pads on the pcb a bit smaller so that there is less risk of it happening in the first place.

Still I've been enjoying the heck out of this controller as once I got that issue resolved it easily is the best controller I've used for playing games on my Jag.